Blaze destroys ancient Tibetan town dubbed 'Shangri-La'

Inferno rips through 1,300-year-old Tibetan community, which had been
pin-pointed as the location of the mythical Shangri-La in James Hilton's
novel The Lost Horizon

By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

12:08PM GMT 11 Jan 2014

A ten-hour inferno has destroyed the ancient Tibetan town which, according to the Chinese government, was the earthly incarnation of the lost paradise of Shangri-la.

The blaze, which began in the early hours of Saturday morning, swept through the narrow alleys of Duzekong, a 1,300-year-old village high up in the mountains of Tibet which was once a stop on the southern Silk Road.

Thousands of firefighters, soldiers and police were mobilised to fight the blaze, but were unable to save hundreds of the traditional wooden buildings that helped create a boom in tourism since 2001, when China officially renamed Duzekong - and the modern Chinese town that has sprung up around it - as Shangri-la.

“The fire was huge, the wind was blowing hard and the air was dry,” said He Yu, one of the town’s 3,000 or so residents, to the Associated Press. “It kept burning and the firefighters were there but there was little they could do because they could not get their fire engines into the narrow streets.”

Investigators said the fire began at the Ruyi Inn, and that it was unlikely to be arson. One tourist who visited in 2012 said that electrical wires in the old town were a chaotic tangle and that a shop had caught fire during her visit, causing a mini-blackout.

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Officials also said there had been no casualties. While the area is often swamped with tourists during the Spring and Summer, the temperature on Saturday dipped to -8C.

Shangri-la was coined by the novelist James Hilton in his 1933 book Lost Horizon to describe a mystical valley in the western end of the Kunlun mountains, guided by monks who live for hundreds of years. The lost paradise has a “dream-like texture” where the air has a “deep anaesthetising tranquility”, wrote Mr Hilton.

Over the years, there have been several competing claims to be the real Shangri-la. Officials in the Yunnanese town of Lijiang claimed that Hilton had been inspired by a series of photographs of their town by Joseph Rock, an American botanist.

In 1999, a team of American explorers found a gorge hidden deep in the Himalayas, which they claimed as Shangri-la and named as the Hidden Falls of the Tsangpo. In the same year, another team announced that the Muli monastery in southern Sichuan was the lost paradise. Sang-la, in the valley of the same name near the border between India and Tibet also has a claim.

Two years later, Tibet started cooperating with its neighbouring provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan to “optimise all Shangri-la tourism resources”, in short an attempt to coordinate their efforts to prevent an unseemly scramble of competing claims. In the same year, Zhongdian county, where Duzekong sits, became the first place in China to be officially renamed.

The move created an enormously successful tourism industry. Some 25 travel agents in Shangri-la now employ nearly 2,500 guides and over 300 private hotels have sprung up. Roughly four hours by bus from Lijiang, there is now a 78ft-tall Buddhist prayer wheel, as well as art galleries, restaurants selling yak burgers and a “reggae” cafe.